


A Drop From On High

by Barkour



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-07 00:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6777373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is not a man. Perhaps before Wanda Vision wants to be one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Drop From On High

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Captain America 3: Civil War. This is some meandering art nonsense so be warned.

1\. 

"Ask questions," Tony said, "learn. Supposedly it's not that hard but what do I know?" He patted Vision on the shoulder.

"What does it mean," Vision asked, "when you pat someone on the shoulder?" He demonstrated on Tony.

"Well, first of all," said Tony, winded where he'd fallen on the table, "you should probably learn the difference between a 'pat' and 'hitting someone.'"

"Oh," said Vision.

This lesson, early learned: gently, softly. Modulate every touch to fit the requirements of the interaction. Do not underestimate human fragility.

2\. 

Wanda wore loose skirts and loose sweaters and her ruddied brown hair loose too. This seemed unwise to Vision. He told her so.

She touched the back of her head with light fingertips. In the other hand she clasped a pastel pink mug of hot chocolate. On the mug a unicorn said "Feeling Horny!" The black paint of her nails was chipping at the edges. 

"Does it ... look bad?" Wanda frowned at him. 

"Oh," he said, taken aback. "No. I didn't mean the way it looked. Loose hair is unstrategic. Aren't you concerned that someone will pull it in a combat situation?"

She dropped her hand to cup the mug in both hands. A little steam moved in slow circulations from the mug. Her lips were a darkened pink on the edge as she drank.

"Not really," she said. Wanda eyed him. He shifted under her consideration. "You wear a cape."

"Yes, but I may render it immaterial. Most challengers would struggle to consolidate their grip on me."

Wanda's nose wrinkled. She smiled. The act of smiling made three fine creases in her cheek, so fine as to be nearly imperceptible. Vision focused upon them. Very delicate, down, and likewise fine hairs covered her skin.

She tipped her head. Her loose and half-tangled hair slipped along her shoulders. He tracked this motion, as he tracked the studious beating of her heart, the working of her lungs, the twitch of each finger. 

"Not me."

Vision permitted that this intrigued. He tipped his head as well in an anti-mirror motion, so that as her head tipped to the left, his left, his head tipped to the right. Her smile deepened. He smiled too. 

"And how would you tackle me?"

Her nose wrinkled again. She bent her shoulders up. It was a protective maneuver. She straightened her head.

"I wouldn't tackle you. Only..."

He was of a superior height, a superior weight. Wanda was sixty-six inches tall. She weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. Some of this was muscle. She walked with the careful, balanced stride of someone who might have danced.

She lifted her hand from the mug again. He turned his eyes to the electrical red that whispered along her thin knuckles. The crackling light illuminated small crimson pockets on her face. It made her hair like blood, or like the red of his own face.

"Perhaps," she said, then she hesitated. "If I were to concentrate--"

A curious sensation. A physical sensation. The rippling of her fingers ticked at the stone that constructed his being. It was as though her hand moved inside of his head. He stared at her hand. He could see the bones beneath the skin, the muscles on the bones, the infinitesimal veins and nerves that ran in concordance with each other. 

A series of facts, acknowledged. Power sufficient to alter the structural framework of reality. This too the proof of Vision, existent outside and yet within reality. She had manipulated the brain of Bruce Banner utilizing what Thor named magic. A science outside current understanding. She was twenty-three years old. 

Wanda dropped her hand. She rolled her shoulders. Discomfort settled on her as a familiar blanket. She withdrew into the simpler framework of her bones.

"If you had reason," said Vision, "I believe that you could. You're very..." He, too, hesitated. The breadth of the English language did not possess sufficient scope. "Strong."

"Dangerous, you mean."

"Strong of will," he said. "And of heart."

She looked at him over the mug. The steam had faded. She cupped the warmth nevertheless as though it were needed. 

"How would you know?" Then she winced. "I'm sorry. I did not mean--"

He shook his head. He smiled. Smiles offered comfort. The frowning corner of her mouth lifted a measure. 

"There is no insult," said Vision. His smile deepened, a move without calculation. "I've been monitoring your cardiovascular system, and your heart is in excellent condition."

A sweep of her eyelashes. Then her smile cracked, and she turned her round face to her arm and laughed quietly into her sweater's chunky knit sleeve.

Pleased, Vision said, "What does chocolate taste like?"

"What kind of chocolate?"

He thought. "The chocolate you're drinking."

She told him. He liked to ask her questions. Wanda did not treat him like a child or perhaps a monster. Vision supposed they were like kin. She drank of her mug. Her lips, slicked. She rubbed at her mouth with her sleeve. The lipstick roughed. 

"What is it?" she asked.

He blinked at her. An unnecessary function but it put the others at ease. 

"Nothing," he said quickly. She rucked her mouth to one side. He looked away from it. "I was only wondering--what it would be like to taste."

"Sometimes," said Wanda, "it is very good."

"Sometimes it is not?"

"Sometimes," she said, "the smells are very bad."

"Ah," said Vision. "Another advantage I possess."

Another smile, catalogued.

3.

He possessed the capability for physical sensation. Heat, cold. Very slowly he mapped the distinctions between soft and hard. Stone did not give as flesh gave and so stone necessitated greater force if it was to be altered. This is the limitation of bone. 

Vision understood the physiological purpose of blood. What then escaped comprehension?

Wanda's skin had a dusk tone to it. The veins did not show blue through her flesh as did Miss Potts' veins. Yet awareness persisted. Here the arteries, the branches, the forks. 

In an altercation with well-equipped and well-financed bank robbers in downtown Los Angeles, Wanda twisted a wrist to drag a man out the first level window by his foot. The underside of her wrist flashed. A reed-like blue forked vein showed leading from the rounded heel of her palm under the cuff of her jacket. 

Irrelevant to the task. He dismissed it. Yet there it lingered regardless, a peculiar reminder of the mortal vessel. The flesh, the blood. The heart that must beat. How the tendon that ran diagonally through her throat tensed like a braided iron cable and then quivered as though strummed by some careful finger.

4.

In the field Tony clutched Rhodey to his breast. Blood ran bluely then oxidized when exposed to red, to scarlet, to brown, dried. The fluctuation of the pupils in concurrence with: heartbeat, blood pressure, physical pain, the implacable and unkind onset of shock.

"I was distracted," said Vision. Tony looked at him. It was insufficient. This was blood as Vision had spilled it. He had known that it turned red in the taint of oxygen. He did not know why it should shock him to see it. 

I could not let her fall, Vision did not say. I could not allow Wanda to break like this. 

Tony rocked Rhodey in his arms. Consider the hugeness of suffering. Consider the fragile work of the human spine. Consider her neck bent at a stiff angle and the blood in her veins made slow and the pupils of her eyes blown huge and black with death. 

Vision existed outside of feeling. An emptiness dwelt inside him.

Tony ripped the rest of the helmet from Rhodey's head. Vision stirred.

"Mr Stark, if his spine has been injured, then--"

"Shut up!" Tony snarled. "God damn it, Vision, would you just--" 

He stroked helplessly at Rhodey's head. The short cropped hairs rasped at his palm. He held Rhodey near enough that Rhodey might hear his heartbeat. 

"I'll see to the others," said Vision.

Tony did not look to him. Vision rose into the air. He looked back the way he had come. Personnel in black suits swarmed the tarmac. He could not stop what was happening. He saw her from a distance, from this height. She was all he saw. The tightness of his vision was an alarm. I know her heartbeat, he thought without context. But he had held her, as Tony held Rhodey.

Vision did not know what he was to do, what he was meant to do, what he could do. And so he did nothing.

5.

Before this.

"Why do you wear these sweater vests?"

Wanda shielded her eyes from the sun with a hand. She squinted up at him. Nine inches in height separated them. An additional distance of ten inches made parallel to the roof. They stood together on top of the compound, leaned against the rail that overlooked the third floor pool.

"They're comfortable," he said. 

Her eyes moved. She was looking at the breadth of his shoulders. A measurement, made.

"But do you need them?"

He considered his words. In the end he opted for the simplest answer.

"They make me look more human."

Wanda's cheeks creased. "You're red and green. Like Christmas lights." She said Christmas with a wry indifference. She was Jewish, he remembered.

Vision made a demonstration of looking at the backs of his hands and then the palms. 

"I thought I was blending in." 

She laughed. "Oh, you've learned jokes."

He smiled but said, "That was Tony's. I'm only repeating what he said."

"You could lie." 

The wind moved in her hair. He thought to brush it from her eyes. She swept it aside herself.

"No," he said.

She folded her arms on the rail. Her lidded gaze turned on the city. The afternoon was warm and she had opted to wear another black jacket.

"That's what humans do," she said. "We lie."

"Sometimes, you do," said Vision. "But you're very honest."

She looked at him. Wanda's eyes were dark. A lip of red encircled the irises.

"Not as honest as you."

"Perhaps. But you have an advantage on me," he said. "You have a conscience, the experience, to know when a lie is the kinder thing to do."

Her mouth hardened. "When are lies the kinder thing?"

"When they're meant to protect. To shield someone from a greater hurt."

Wanda shook her head. It disturbed her hair. A long hank ran along her cheek and twisted there in the wind. She had three asymmetrically placed freckles along her neck, behind her ear.

"Protecting someone, by lying to them." She made a noise like a snort. Her shoulders bunched. "Do you know, I thought that HYDRA protected me. They did this, to me," she said, unfolding the fingers of one hand and holding the palm out to the sun, "and I thought, they're protecting me. They're keeping me safe. But they were lying."

"They never wanted to protect you," said Vision, "only to use what they could make of you."

"And how do I know when to believe if someone else is lying about protecting me?" she asked.

He looked at her. Her brows were carefully penciled. Wanda made a great effort to appear as if she did not care to make an effort.

Hesitatingly Vision reached a hand out to her. His fingers were half-curled, limp. She watched him as he did this. The cloth of his shirt creased along his extending arm. He shifted; the sweater vest did not bunch so much. At the last inch, he moved more steadily and with two fingers he tucked the wayward hank of hair behind her freckled ear.

"I would not lie to you," said Vision.

Wanda looked suddenly away from him. Her hand moved up to her ear. She'd repainted her nails black. The nail of the little finger had two green star stickers fixed to it. 

She said, "Can you even tell a lie?"

He said, "I haven't had a reason to try."

She said, "Don't lie." She looked at him again. "Don't tell lies. They only hurt people."

He said, "Yes. All right," and then he said, "Thank you."

"For what?"

Vision thought of touching her again. To fit his fingers to the underside of her wrist where the blood ran and her pulse beat. Would he recognize these finer sensations or were such touches beyond him? The sun washed pale across her face.

"For teaching me," he said.

6.

And after. What was left, after? 

In the common area where he had used to play chess with Rhodey or with Steve, Vision sat alone. The chess board was set up before him. On the glass table, left of the board, he had set a Mickey Mouse latte mug. Steam softened the look of the drink.

He thought that he had learned grief. He perceived the shape of it. It was the necklace that Pepper Potts still wore. It was Tony swearing as he cleaned coffee grounds from the garbage disposal because it was easier to curse this than to curse one's self. The sweat that marked Rhodey's skin as he relearned how to walk. 

The air conditioning hummed. The room was otherwise silent. Two forty-nine in the morning. A Friday. Vision folded his hands in his lap. He refolded them. 

This isn't paprika. He imagined Wanda's smile. She teased. 

He had stood in her path. He'd caught her as she fell. She did not ask him if he hated her for it, the changing of him so that he was not immaterial but purely physical.

Vision took up the mug. He looked into it at the hot chocolate. Wanda put marshmallows into her chocolate. He put the mug down and stood. The marshmallows were in a bag in the cupboard, the bag closed with a yellow clip advertising a local attorney's office. He carried the bag to the common room. Six marshmallows. He added a seventh. Lucky number seven.

Slowly the sugar melted. The marshmallows faded into each other. A white film covered the surface of the drink. He thought of that phantom sensation of a fingernail running along the inside of his skull. How he had burned, as he could not burn, as Wanda bent him into the earth like a stone to be buried.

He took the mug up. He drank. Vision looked at the chess board. The pieces were aligned in precision, awaiting the first move of a new game. He tasted nothing. Vision held the mug cupped between his hands.

"I miss you," he said. The words were strange in his mouth. They were true. 

He drank of the chocolate again. He drank all of it. He felt the heat in his mouth and on his hands. He cradled it. It reminded him of the burning. He wondered if this was how desire felt. The fire that ate away at the stuff of your being. 

The hours clicked on. Vision made two more mugs. He drank the second and half of the third, then he poured the rest down the sink. He braced his hands on the counter and leaned forward. It is catastrophe. That is the shape of grief.

7.

Delineate the borders of desire. Is it the longing for a voice? The fashion that this particular set of fingers might furl or unfurl. The exquisite arch of her thumb as she pulled the spitting hex out of the flesh of her palm. She had done this as a syringe inserted might withdraw a length of blood.

Recall:

Vision moved through the wall as he moved through air. "Wanda--"

She threw two pillows at him, and he ducked, surprised, slipping through both air and wall. He looked up wide eyed over his arms, folded before his face. Wanda drew the blanket over her. Her face was red, her hair in disarray.

"Do not go through my bedroom wall!"

He translated this swiftly from the common Sokovian dialect Ру́сский язы́к.

"I am sorry," said Vision, somewhat confused still. "Were you busy? I saw that you were awake--"

She cursed at him in the Russian, the rural Sokovian, and lastly in unexpected, rough French before she threw another pillow at him.

"Go away, Vision!" she said. "You're supposed to knock before you come into a girl's room."

"Earlier, when we talked, you said that I could come to you with--"

Wanda sat upright. Her black shirt was rucked along her left side. The blanket pooled in her lap. He realized suddenly that while she wore a shirt, the swell of hip exposed against the bed was bare and this meant she did not wear briefs.

Vision looked to her face. He knew that his eyes were wide and unblinking. Tony said this made him appear "serial killer-esque" and "creepy, like you're an owl. Blink more, for god's sake." He blinked.

Wanda pushed the hair from her face. Her cheeks had darkened. She swallowed. Vision existed at a loss for language.

When she spoke again she did so with care.

"If you need to talk to me. And my door is closed. Then that means you have to knock and wait to see if I invite you." 

Her lips began to tremble. She pushed at her hair again. He averted his eyes.

"It's very impolite," said Wanda, "to barge in on a girl."

"You are twenty-three," said Vision, "does that not make you a woman?"

"It's not polite to walk in on a woman either!"

"Of course." He hesitated. His gaze darted to her. He forced it away. "Thank you for explaining it to me. I'll go now."

"Thank you," said Wanda.

He said, "You're welcome." He went out through the wall again.

But that was human desire and it did not belong to him. Is it not so?

8.

He caught her as she fell. He had caught her before. The weight of her flesh in his arms. The solidity of her bones. Vision looked into her eyes and a resonance sounded inside him. A catastrophe. All of it.

They are doomed, Ultron had said to him.

Yes, Vision had said to him.

A distraction. A disaster. 

9\. 

Vision flew to Wakanda and to the cliff-side palace that was given to the king. 

Wanda looked up to face him as he fell silent and empty-made through the ceiling. She did not smile at him, but nor did she curse.

He settled on his feet. He did not bear the cape. The heels of his men's shoes scraped upon the stone-tiled floor.

"You're supposed to knock," said Wanda.

"Yes," he said. "I know."

"My door is closed."

"I wanted to see you."

She looked away. Her hair tangled along her shoulder. 

"I knew that you would come."

The room was beautifully appointed, a room fit for the guest of a king. She had lit two lamps, each in distant corners, and the golden-set light made sweet hollows of her clavicle and her throat. Seven cervical vertebrae composed the bone-frame of her neck. Wanda sat on a tall bed with her hands laid flat on the finely embroidered brocade duvet.

"So," she said. "Are you here to drag me back to prison?"

"No," he said.

Her eyes were dark, red-streaked, thicked with shadows. As Wanda spoke her lips, clean now of paint, peeled from her teeth.

"More lies," she said, "to protect me from the world."

"I will not lie to you," he said to Wanda. "I did not lie to you."

The fingers of her left hand knotted into the fabric. Stress lines radiated out from her fist.

"You didn't tell me the truth," she said. It was a quiet wounding.

He lowered his gaze. Her knees were bared by the shorts she wore. Her toes, as naked, curled. He lifted his gaze from this. 

"I didn't want to tell you," said Vision. "Because I was afraid that you would leave. And that you would not be able to come back."

"I am not a child."

"No," said Vision, and he looked around the room with its gild-framed portraits, the silver drapings, the smart-touch television that silently replayed punditry concerning Sokovia, Lagos, government secrets, government accountability. Lies. Truths. 

"But in many ways," Vision allowed, "I believe that I am one."

She drew her knees to her chest. Her arms, she folded about her knees. Her chin, she set upon her arms. Wanda looked at him. She'd scrubbed her fingernails clean of lacquer. The white edges were uneven.

"Tony said that you were angry," she said to Vision. "That I 'pissed you off.'"

He had stared at her as she pushed him into the earth, fixed upon the swiftly dwindling spot where she stood and stared at him even when he could no longer see the light from the room.

"I wasn't angry with you."

"Tell me the truth."

He clasped his hands together behind his back. His right thumb flexed repeatedly in a rhythm he could not name.

"The truth," said Vision. A man would swallow. A man would blink. He did neither. This was the truth. He was not a man.

"The truth is," he said, slowly, steadily too, "that I no longer--" A hesitation. He struggled with it. This contrast between what he believed and what he desired. 

The naked skin of her knees was whitened in small rounded spots where her fingers dug in. Her shoulders, tensed, were bent with waiting. Unblinking in her turn Wanda watched him.

They had made her. They had made him. A tone like a hum worked in his head.

He said it at last.

"I didn't care about the accords. When I saw you fall." He met her eyes. "It seemed suddenly... Unimportant." His brow knitted. He looked at her and yet he did not see her. "As if the reality of this one life outstripped the measure of so many others. And I thought that the only thing I've ever known is this fighting, and you."

She said, "Vizh." Her shoulders rose and fell. Her hands tightened upon her shins. An ugliness moved under her skin.

"I know you don't want that," said Vision. He averted his eyes again. "It's like another prison. Isn't it? Caring for someone."

Wanda closed her eyes. More stress lines, these at the corners of her eyes, made by the force of her clenching.

"It breaks you open," she said. "When you lose them. When you have them. You don't feel that way for me."

"I do," said Vision. "I'm miserable without you." He touched, briefly, the stone in his forehead. "I feel as if... There are two parts of me and the better part is you. And I don't want it. It's supposed to be beautiful."

"What's beautiful?" she asked him, a dull question heavy with old grief. 

Two children alone in a world that saw only what it could make of them. Her brother was dead. Wanda lived. 

"Love," said Vision.

She turned her face up to him. He saw no flushed pleasure in her. No great joy.

"Yes," she said after a moment. "It is. Supposed to be beautiful. But it's just another way for you to hurt."

"Why?" he asked. "Why does it hurt?"

"Why," said Wanda, "do you think I know?"

"Because you live," said Vision, "and I don't, and I'm meant to be more than this, this wanting. How am I meant to understand the right thing to do when all I want is to talk to you?"

Wanda unfolded her arms. She unfolded her legs. She moved to the edge of the bed. Her knees bent along the edge. Now Vision waited. He thought: she must know. She, who had buried him.

Finally she spoke. 

"They put me in a jacket," she said. "With the arms belted behind me. So I couldn't use my hands. Because they were afraid of me. Of what I could do. They're all afraid." Her lashes rose. "You're afraid too."

"Not of you."

"But because of me," said Wanda. 

He considered her. He thought of how she had said it, don't lie to me. The realization did not dawn. There was nothing of the sun in it. 

"You feel it too," said Vision. He touched his chest without meaning to. Coiled fingers to press over a heart that did not beat inside him. 

Grief made hard lines of her mouth. "And I felt it when Pietro died."

He took a step toward her. Then he stopped. He had worn a button-up shirt, a sweater vest, slacks. The trappings of a man. Why had he worn them? He wanted to be like a man, to put men at ease. No. To be a man before Wanda.

Vision made a small movement with his hand. 

"How do you find happiness in what's left?"

Her hair shifted as she lifted her head. For a long and quiet minute Wanda only looked at him. He saw her. She saw him. Her bare feet pressed to the stone floor. She stood.

She said, "You just keep living."

"How do you do it?"

He had no nerves. No blood to run through him. The resonant hum strengthened in him. The weight that she had gifted him, the physicality that she had put on him: he remembered it as if it were true now.

Wanda lifted her hand. It hitched in the air. She swallowed. Her gaze was set firmly on his chest. The lamplight broke on his back and so she stood in a shadow, his shadow. She put her hand on his chest.

He felt: the faint heat of her palm. The lightness of her touch. Then its strength. A hum that moved in his chest, too, as the red in her eyes sparked. He cupped her bent elbow. Their faces were turned to each other.

"You just try," said Wanda. "Because it's the only thing left for you to do."

His fingers spread along her arm. She was rising from the floor, her toes dripping. The hum grew louder. She was like the air, lifting, and he was like a stone, planted.

"And what's left?" he asked.

Wanda looked down at him, a half inch that separated them, he and her, she and him. 

"Me," she said. "You."

"Is it enough?"

Wanda gave a little heave of her shoulders. She had no answers. Nor could he guess at what the answer might be. 

Vision raised his hand. At last, he touched her cheek. He imagined he felt those soft hairs there. Surely there was something he must say to her. 

She leaned in. Her lips were shy on his lips. She drew away. Her breath was warm on his flesh, such that it was. Wanda did not look on him as something strange or something terrible. She only looked at him.

Again she said, "Don't lie to me," and again she kissed him.

I don't think that I can, he thought as he had thought some months before on the rooftop of the compound where he now lived in near solitude. But he remembered the silences. He thought of the emptiness in the compound. The games of chess he played opposite himself. The pink mug as it sat untouched in the cabinet but for the once he had pulled it out and held it in his hand then put it on the topmost shelf where he might reach it but he need not see it.

Vision said, "I won't lie to you. Wanda," and he met her kiss, and the point of resonation engulfed him, and for a time he felt as if he were whole and that he understood.


End file.
